Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider Heroku has announced that its Heroku Postgres is available as a stand-alone service.

The move puts PostgreSQL in the hands of developers who do not host their projects on the Heroku platform. Up until now the service was available only to Heroku customers for use with Heroku platform apps, said Matthew Soldo, a Heroku engineer, in a blog post.

Object database

PostgreSQL is an open-source object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) available for many platforms, including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MS Windows and Mac OS X. It is released under the PostgreSQL Licence, which is an MIT-style license.

“With measured service uptime of four nines [99.99 percent], and designed data durability of 11 nines [99.999999999 percent], the service is trustworthy for mission-critical data,” Soldo said. “As of today, these production-quality Heroku Postgres databases are independently available for use from any cloud platform, provisioned instantly, metered by the second, and without contract.”

The Heroku database-as-a-service comes in a variety of pricing plans ranging from $200 (£129) a month for a 1.7GB cache to $6,400(£4,116) for a 68GB cache.

Speaking further on the reliability of Heroku’s Postgres solution, Soldo said, “Heroku Postgres has successfully and safely written 19 billion customer transactions, and another 400 million write-transactions are processed every day. Leveraging Heroku’s scale and expertise while enabling your team to focus on building great apps rather than managing and configuring databases.”

The Heroku database service has a rich API, accessible via command-line tools and a clean and simple Web-based user interface.

“Use it for provisioning, generating connection strings, viewing usage statistics and capturing snapshots,” Soldo said. “These tools work for both stand-alone databases and those attached to Heroku apps.”